Physicist Stephen Hawking denounced for believing...

Free-will, consciousness, and spirit. What are they? How are they defined? Do they have properties that we can focus on? When people ask me about these things I usually say, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

The ego involved in these discussions fascinates me. You have one man who is primarily a mathematician concluding what it means to be a human, then a line full of no nothing scientific snobs preaching the nonsense like its fact.Massive ego....

reply to post by TimeCrisis




Don't be a hypocrite mate.

Ok so Hawkings is saying that our brains are a computer, the software of which is highly advanced capable of simulating emotion, self awareness, compassion etc. That all of our actions, from birth to death are a set of instructions, that offer many routes of completion depending upon input, but essentially deterministic. The other guy is saying this is a dangerous idea because it devalues humanity, that some how belief in determinism allows the view that humans are worthless or expendable. Well if I feel compassion, self awareness and operate within the boundaries of my deterministic programming as if I have free will, then effectively I do have compassion, self awareness and free will. It doesn't matter If we are programmed for free will or we have an energetic identity making decisions through our brain, its irrelevant. What matter's is what we are experiencing. Compassion, love, free will are what they are regardless of the source. To say, you are not really feeling pain, your experience is just a software simulation, so therefore I don't have to take notice of your pain, is not a logical argument. Simulated pain to the simulant is still pain. If Hawkings is correct or not remains to be seen but it is irrelevant.

we alone decide who we are

reply to post by Somehumanbeing


Nicely said.

reply to post by Somehumanbeing


Free will is the act of collapsing probability waves into specific states through observation, guided by the intelligent, quantum entangled energy that we are at a base level. For all the proof you need that energy can have intelligence and architecture just look in a mirror.

Originally posted by soldita
reply to post by Somehumanbeing

 

Not true. I understand the basics of physiological science and am educated enough to even "understand" that which I don't understand. Right now I can do whatever I want; sit-ups, nap, whatever. This choice is up to me and me alone. Just because my past exists therefore I have learned from that therefore am statistically inclined to choose based on physiology, has no bearing the existence of free will.

But still studies show that the brain starts preparing for this said action well before you even consciously think about doing them.

reply to post by Nikola014


It amazes me determinism is even seriously considered anymore, by anyone, especially Dr. Hawkings. Hiesenburg, Two Slit Experiment and etc shows just how incorrect the idea is.

um! Antimater.....
put the two togethere.

Originally posted by backinblack
reply to post by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi

 

Loved it..

Edit to add:

We are also all constructed from the remnant star dust that formed our solar system.

You are correct..
Science tells us that matter can not be destroyed, only it's state altered..
Therefore every atom in our body has been around since the beginning..

edit on 12-6-2011 by backinblack because: (no reason given)

reply to post by Nikola014


At some point throught time, there has always been an opposite side of the coin....

Man is alone in the Universe
We are the center of the Universe
The world is Flat
God Exists
Multiple Gods Exist

I think the only people who should be denounced, and rightfully so, are those people who denounce others for not having a closed mind.

Scientists should embrace the concept of more than one opinion.
We should embrace the concept of more than one opinion.

We should reject any person who feels the need to denounce a person for having a thought that does not run with main stream thought / science.

To denounce scientists for having a view that we do not have souls etc, is no different than denouncing a person who believes in telekenesis or ESP.

One of the fundamental questions science demands of people who believe in Telekenesis or ESP is - Prove it.


No problem guys... just as soon as you prove God exists.

Never never never stop accepting more than one idea.

As Albert Einstein once said -

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

and to date, we, humankind, have created all of the problems we face.

Why on Gods earth would we accept defeat and admonish those who have a different opinion that very well could be the answer?

Man i know this is gonna sound rough but......If you were one of the greatest genius's of all time and you were stuck in a prison of your own mind..Would you believe in God?

Hawking is a smart man, but I must disagree with he and his cronies. You might have to be quite dense to believe that we, as a human race, are nothing more than biological machines driven by chemical reactions. I personally believe that we are all greater than most seem.

reply to post by aboveGoos


Exactly. As a science-based atheist myself, I find the notions of how we actually DID come about to be vastly more awe-inspiring than anything the various religions have ever cooked up. If nothing else, it lets you know that you are free.

Or as the Discordians put it...

I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free

reply to post by JoeDaShom


My argument is that you have to be a seriously egotistical bastard to assume that each one of us has some grand universal plan centered around us.

Sorry. You're a mobile lump of proteins. Don't worry, you'll get over it eventually.

reply to post by TheWalkingFox


Fair enough, muchacho.

My two cents worth.

Statistically speaking, and statistics count for something in science, Hawking's view that man is simply a complicated machine with no spiritual/transcendental accompaniment, is held by a miniscule proportion of humans and is, I'm guessing, not even a majority view among scientists.

Everyone knows that bodily functions can be initiated by electrical impulses and that most of what the body does is perform biologically programmed functions.

But that doesn't account for everything that the body does. There are choices made and some of those choices are hard to reconcile with biological programming.

Hawking severly underrates the amount of intelligence that people in the religious life have brought to this subject. We all know that he has been busy doing other things.

W.H. Auden, the great English poet, had a similar materialistic view and once remarked that the last thing on earth he would like to be is a disembodied spirit.

I have no doubt that the last thing on earth that he was, was precisely that.

Originally posted by TimeCrisis
The ego involved in these discussions fascinates me. You have one man who is primarily a mathematician concluding what it means to be a human, then a line full of no nothing scientific snobs preaching the nonsense like its fact.Massive ego....

I agree with you. It is only his opinion and I lost a lot of respect when Hawking included this in his latest book. Coincidentally I just sold the last Hawking book I'll ever own yesterday. I don't denounce him or denounce him based off his religious views. I'm just done because he contradicted himself and I buy a physics book for physics, not to read one man's struggle to understand religion or introduce yet another theory that really can't be scientifically proven. When scientists attempt to use science for or against proving god or its existence it basically mocks the scientific method and I lose a lot of respect for them as a scientist. For one it plays right into the other sides argument.

I personally think the whole "creator not needed for the Big Bang" was just a ruse to drum up publicity that book.

If you step on a college campus you can see that science and "debunking" religion is mostly the new Christianity (regional reference) or current popular religion. Science is in right now at specific demographic levels and I should have been careful when I wished that more people took an interest. I did not exactly mean I hoped more people would take an active interest by grouping up and mocking "Truthers", the religious and purchasing a Sagan poster for the apt. or dorm room wall after getting high and watching a few of his vids. Unfortunately, that has mostly been my experience in and past secondary school. That and wondering just how many students would make it through their studies if they couldn't purchase any adderall.

I got a rude awakening because I used to imagine that if scientists or advocates of "learning the ways of the world through physics" were ever the majority we wouldn't attack or oppress. We're smarter than that I thought. The oppression and belief based mockery still exits. Only I've been noticing that in some areas of the US it has shifted. When all along we should be at a point where it doesn't matter and people are free to believe or not believe what they want without persecution.

My experience can't and doesn't speak for anyone else, but it seems like in the few places I've lived over the past 20 years religious tolerance has actually declined. There seems to be the nice respectful, ideal world I dreamed of as a child in regards to religious tolerance as the metropolitan area gets larger.

Wait, so when Halking talks about 'human beings,' is he including himself as well or is he considering himself as an exception?

One of the problems with scientific materialists is that they spend their time studying "brain function" and leave the study of "mind function" to the so-called soft sciences of psychology and psychiatry. The Church of Science takes it as an article of faith that there is nothing beyond brain function to study.

In fact "mind function" has been studied extensively, logically and in some ways scientifically, by religious people around the world, most notably in Hinduism and really rigorously in Buddhism. This study has been going on for a couple of thousand years. The Church of Science, like any other unscientific, intolerant orthodoxy, dismisses all of that study and experience out of hand.

This is beginning to change, at last, which is why, even in scientific circles, Hawking's views are not widely held.